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enVarious Phrenological Models 2http://www.rc.umd.edu/gallery/various-phrenological-models-2
<section class="field field-name-field-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">This image provides multiple illustrations of skulls and famous busts, providing measurements for each by which organ size can be determined. Note especially the famous political figures, as well as the attention paid to notorious criminals. </div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-copyright field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Copyright:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Copyright 2009, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-galleryimage field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Gallery Image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/galleryOriginals/a5bc8146dd67cc0c61bb45e288e7e0f2.jpg" width="2321" height="4229" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-text-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1847</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-image-date field-type-partial-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1847</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-publication-date field-type-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Original publication date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1846-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1846</span></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-subject field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Subject:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The choice of heads displayed in <em>Fowler’s Practical Phrenology</em> (1847) is suggestive of the larger issues towards which phrenology was applied. Note especially the famous literary figures. The illustrations invite a comparison of humans to animals as well as a comparison of classes, ethnic groups, and levels of adherence to social norms.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-pub-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Added Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">2009-5-20</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-agent field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Agent:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">William Shakespeare</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-shakespeare" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Shakespeare</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/orson-squire-fowler" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Orson Squire Fowler</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-user field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated User:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">William Shakespeare</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-primary-works field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Primary Works:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Fowler's Practical Phrenology</em></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-accession-number- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Accession Number:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">BF 870.F6</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-height-in-centimeters field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Height (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">15</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-width-in-centimeters- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Width (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">8</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-edition-and-state field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Edition and State:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Unknown</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-printing-context field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Printing Context:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Created for <em>Fowler's Practical Phrenology</em></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-texts field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Texts:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Fowler's Practical Phrenology (1847)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Fowler’s handbook was described by one reviewer as “the best work now extant on the elementary principles and practical part of the science” (“Article VI” 187). The book, which had sold almost ten thousand copies by 1841, incorporated the work of Franz Joseph Gall, Johann Spurzheim, George Combe, and others into a single comprehensive guide to phrenology (“Article VI” 187). An examination of Fowler’s handbook reveals the extent to which he drew on these preceding thinkers: the names, locations, and descriptions of the organs of interest to phrenology are similar, as is the larger discussion on the uses of phrenology. Fowler also expanded on the work of British phrenologists, discussing physiognomy as well as its sub-science phrenology, providing accounts of the effects of diet and habit on an individual’s character, offering clear directions for the process of phrenological examination, and narrating accounts of successful examinations. The work also included letters objecting to phrenological truths, accompanied by Fowler's own responses in defence of those truths. Furthermore, Fowler expanded the discussion of organs of phrenology; his descriptions span nearly 150 pages. The description of the organ of approbativeness, for example, is given six pages. An individual with a large organ of approbativeness “is extremely sensitive upon every point connected with his honour, his character, his reputation, &c., and, in all he does, will have an eye to the approbation and the disapprobation of his fellow men” (Fowler 108).<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div><em>Outlines of Phrenology (1824)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Although any of the didactic literature on phrenology might be appropriate here, George Combe’s <em>Outlines of Phrenology</em> is especially appropriate. Combe was one of the earliest advocates of phrenology in the UK; he initiated both the Edinburgh Phrenological Society and its journal, the <em>Phrenological Journal and Miscellany</em>. Combe published several phrenological tracts on the philosophical and scientific backgrounds of phrenology and its use in education, criminal investigation and correction, and theology (Spencer 292). Combe’s books were sold widely in the United States; he also lectured in the United States from 1838 to 1840 (“Advertisement” 76; “Article VI” 187). <div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div><em>Outlines of Phrenology</em> was first published in 1824 and was reprinted in additional editions throughout the nineteenth century (Spencer 292). The pamphlet provided a short explanation of the history of phrenology and its main claims before turning to the methodology of phrenological examination. The majority of the text is concerned with descriptions and illustrations of each organ of interest to phrenologists. The discussion of organ 21, imitation, is typical. After providing the location of the organ (“on the two sides of benevolence”), Combe gives a short discussion of the faculty the organ controls: “The faculty gives the talent for Imitation in general. It contributes to render a poet or author dramatic . . . It aids the portrait-painter, sculptor, and engraver; and it gives the tendency, in speech and conversation, to suit the action to the words” (17). He further provides illustrations of head shapes with large or small organs of imitation (Combe 17).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-theme field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Theme:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Phrenology. Science.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-significance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Significance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The mapped head was associated with phrenology from its earliest publications throughout the nineteenth century. It provided a useful map of the locations on the skull discussed in phrenological tracts. One contemporary reviewer explained, “The author’s mode of treating the subject is illustrated, and rendered very intelligible, by a plate of the human head having the organs delineated” (“The Phrenological System"). The phrenological illustrations published by Fowler and Wells and others allowed untrained Americans to conduct their own phrenological readings. Similar illustrations were available to a British audience throughout the 1800s. Ultimately, phrenological guides such as these trained the nineteenth-century reader in a gaze which privileged the exterior and the scientific—a gaze Michel Foucault identified as the "clinical gaze" (Foucault 103ff). In this particular image, the choice of heads displayed is suggestive of the larger issues towards which phrenology was applied. The use of Shakespeare’s head as a model reflects a common interest in examining literary figures: Spurzheim owned and probably created a cast of Samuel Coleridge, made in 1825 (Paley 150); Charlotte Bronte was examined by a phrenologist in 1851 (Dames 367). </div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-bibliography field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Bibliography:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">"Advertisement 2 -- no Title." Christian Register and Boston Observer (1835-1843) May 13 1843: 76.<em> ProQuest</em>. Web. 1 May. 2009.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>“Article VI.” <em>American Phrenological Journal</em>. (1841): 185-9. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Colbert, Charles. <em>A Measure of Perfection</em>. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Combe, George. <em>Outlines of Phrenology</em>. 5th ed. London: Longman & Co., 1835. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Dames, Nicholas. "The Clinical Novel: Phrenology and 'Villette.'" <em>NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction</em> 29.3 (1996): 367-390. Print. <div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Foucault, Michel. <em>The Birth of the Clinic</em>. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Fowler, Orson Squire. <em>Fowler’s Practical Phrenology: Giving a Concise Elementary View of Phrenology</em>. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1847. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>“Further Particulars of Thurtell, &c.” <em>Examiner</em> 18 Jan. 1824: 40-41.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Paley, Morton D. <em>Portraits of Coleridge</em>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> <em>The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany</em> Vol. 3. (August, 1825 – October, 1826): Edinburgh, 1826. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>“The Phrenological System.” <em>The Bristol Mercury</em> 1697 (September 30, 1822). Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Sekula, Allen. “The Body and the Archive.” <em>October</em> 39 (1986): 3-64. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Spencer, Frank. <em>History of Physical Anthropology</em>. New York: Garland Pub., 1997. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Wrobel, Arthur. "Whitman and the Phrenologists: The Divine Body and the Sensuous Soul." <em>PMLA</em> 89.1 (1974): 17-23. Print.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-long-title field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Long Title:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">EXPLANATION OF THE CUTS. (abbreviated c.)… of a hyena: 30, 37, of an ichneumon: 31, 36, of a fox: 34, crow: 37, 43, of a very cunning and roguish cat: 40, of Shakspeare, from an English portrait, said to be the most correct extant: 41, of Robert Hall: 42, a New Zealander. [The small figures (second row,) placed before the names of the organs, are the numbers of Spurzheim.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-featured-in-exhibit field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Featured in Exhibit:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/exhibit/george-cruikshank-and-phrenological-head">George Cruikshank and the Phrenological Head</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-from-the-collection field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">From the Collection:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/collection/department-special-collections-memorial-library-university-wisconsin-madison">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-people- field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated People:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Orson S. Fowler (1809-1887)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Orson S. Fowler was an American phrenologist who, along with his brother Lorenzo Niles, published <em>The American Phrenological Journal</em>. The Fowlers were instrumental in publicizing George Combe's phrenological principles; they owned a museum and published to an audience of 150 thousand (Colbert 24-6). Fowler was involved in other reform movements and publishing ventures; as a friend of Walt Whitman, he distributed the 1855 edition and published and distributed the 1856 edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> (Wrobel 17).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/phrenology" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">phrenology</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/tags/science" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">science</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-style field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Style:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/style/medicalscientific-textbook-illustration" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Medical/scientific textbook illustration</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-artist-unknown field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Artist Unknown:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Artist Unknown</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-creation-technique- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Creation Technique:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/creation-technique/uncolored-engraving" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Uncolored Engraving</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-creator-author field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Author:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Fowler, Orson Squire</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-support-medium field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Support Medium:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/support-medium/print-bound-in-book" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Print, bound in book</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Romantic Circles Gallery</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-skeleton-data- field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Skeleton Data?:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section>Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:41:04 +000038451 at http://www.rc.umd.eduVarious Phrenological Modelshttp://www.rc.umd.edu/gallery/various-phrenological-models
<section class="field field-name-field-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">This image provides multiple illustrations of skulls and famous busts, providing measurements for each by which organ size can be determined. Note especially the famous political figures, as well as the attention paid to notorious criminals. </div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-copyright field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Copyright:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Copyright 2009, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-galleryimage field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Gallery Image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/galleryOriginals/b60c6503bb0f024b53ed9235fb5ae7f9.jpg" width="4663" height="4236" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-text-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1847</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-image-date field-type-partial-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1847</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-publication-date field-type-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Original publication date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1846-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1846</span></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-subject field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Subject:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The choice of heads displayed in <em>Fowler’s Practical Phrenology</em> (1847) is suggestive of the larger issues towards which phrenology was applied. Note especially the famous literary figures. The illustrations invite a comparison of humans to animals as well as a comparison of classes, ethnic groups, and levels of adherence to social norms.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-pub-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Added Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">2009-5-20</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-agent field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Agent:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">George Washington</div><div class="field-item odd">Benjamin Franklin</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/george-washington" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">George Washington</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/benjamin-franklin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Benjamin Franklin</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/orson-squire-fowler" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Orson Squire Fowler</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-user field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated User:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Kate Lynne Fedewa</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-primary-works field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Primary Works:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Fowler's Practical Phrenology</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-accession-number- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Accession Number:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">BF 870.F6</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-height-in-centimeters field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Height (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">15</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-width-in-centimeters- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Width (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">19</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-edition-and-state field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Edition and State:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Unknown</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-printing-context field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Printing Context:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Created for <em>Fowler's Practical Phrenology</em></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-texts field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Texts:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Fowler's Practical Phrenology (1847)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Fowler’s handbook was described by one reviewer as “the best work now extant on the elementary principles and practical part of the science” (“Article VI” 187). The book, which had sold almost ten thousand copies by 1841, incorporated the work of Franz Joseph Gall, Johann Spurzheim, George Combe, and others into a single comprehensive guide to phrenology (“Article VI” 187). An examination of Fowler’s handbook reveals the extent to which he drew on these preceding thinkers: the names, locations, and descriptions of the organs of interest to phrenology are similar, as is the larger discussion on the uses of phrenology. Fowler also expanded on the work of British phrenologists, discussing physiognomy as well as its sub-science phrenology, providing accounts of the effects of diet and habit on an individual’s character, offering clear directions for the process of phrenological examination, and narrating accounts of successful examinations. The work also included letters objecting to phrenological truths, accompanied by Fowler's own responses in defence of those truths. Furthermore, Fowler expanded the discussion of organs of phrenology; his descriptions span nearly 150 pages. The description of the organ of approbativeness, for example, is given six pages. An individual with a large organ of approbativeness “is extremely sensitive upon every point connected with his honour, his character, his reputation, &c., and, in all he does, will have an eye to the approbation and the disapprobation of his fellow men” (Fowler 108).<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div><em>Outlines of Phrenology (1824)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Although any of the didactic literature on phrenology might be appropriate here, George Combe’s <em>Outlines of Phrenology</em> is especially appropriate. Combe was one of the earliest advocates of phrenology in the UK; he initiated both the Edinburgh Phrenological Society and its journal, the <em>Phrenological Journal and Miscellany</em>. Combe published several phrenological tracts on the philosophical and scientific backgrounds of phrenology and on its use in education, criminal investigation and correction, and theology (Spencer 292). Combe’s books were sold widely in the United States; he also lectured in the United States from 1838 to 1840 (“Advertisement” 76; “Article VI” 187). <div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div><em>Outlines of Phrenology</em> was first published in 1824 and was reprinted in additional editions throughout the nineteenth century (Spencer 292). The pamphlet provided a short explanation of the history of phrenology and its main claims before turning to the methodology of phrenological examination. The majority of the text is concerned with descriptions and illustrations of each organ of interest to phrenologists. The discussion of organ 21, imitation, is typical. After providing the location of the organ (“on the two sides of benevolence”), Combe gives a short discussion of the faculty the organ controls: “The faculty gives the talent for Imitation in general. It contributes to render a poet or author dramatic . . . It aids the portrait-painter, sculptor, and engraver; and it gives the tendency, in speech and conversation, to suit the action to the words” (17). He further provides illustrations of head shapes with large or small organs of imitation (Combe 17).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-theme field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Theme:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Phrenology. Science.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-significance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Significance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The mapped head was associated with phrenology from its earliest publications throughout the nineteenth century. It provided a useful map of the locations on the skull discussed in phrenological tracts. One contemporary reviewer explained, “The author’s mode of treating the subject is illustrated, and rendered very intelligible, by a plate of the human head having the organs delineated” (“The Phrenological System"). Phrenological illustrations published by Fowler and Wells and others allowed untrained Americans to conduct their own phrenological readings. Similar illustrations were available to a British audience throughout the 1800s. The choice of heads displayed here is suggestive of the larger issues toward which phrenology was applied. By choosing to include “Le Blanc, the murderer” and “Philip, a notorious thief and liar,” the illustrator and Fowler record the public’s interest in using phrenology to identify criminals—an interest further documented in news articles and phrenological tracts like <em>The Phrenological Journal</em> (“Further Particulars of Thurtell, &c.”; <em>Phrenological Journal</em>). The application of phrenology to a photographic archive of criminals is well-documented by Allen Sekula (11ff). Similarly, the inclusion of Washington and Franklin is part of a larger phrenological tradition in which key historical figures are used as types in phrenological writing: Combe, for example, compares the large “animal organs” and small “organs of the moral sentiments and intellect” of Pope Alexander VI (15th C) to the large “organs of the moral sentiments and intellect” of Philipp Melancthon (16th C). In doing so, he seeks to contrast the former’s disposition towards "animal indulgence” and tendency “to seek gratification in the directest way” with the latter’s exemplary role as a “great and virtuous reformer” (Combe 30). Finally, phrenological guides trained the nineteenth century reader in a gaze which privileged the exterior and the scientific—a gaze Michel Foucault identified as the “clinical gaze” (Foucault 103ff).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-bibliography field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Bibliography:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">"Advertisement 2 -- no Title." Christian Register and Boston Observer (1835-1843) May 13 1843: 76.<em> ProQuest</em>. Web. 1 May. 2009.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>“Article VI.” <em>American Phrenological Journal</em>. (1841): 185-9. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Colbert, Charles. <em>A Measure of Perfection</em>. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Combe, George. <em>Outlines of Phrenology</em>. 5th ed. London: Longman & Co., 1835. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Dames, Nicholas. "The Clinical Novel: Phrenology and 'Villette.'" <em>NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction</em> 29.3 (1996): 367-390. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Foucault, Michel. <em>The Birth of the Clinic</em>. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Fowler, Orson Squire. <em>Fowler’s Practical Phrenology: Giving a Concise Elementary View of Phrenology</em>. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1847. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>“Further Particulars of Thurtell, &c.” <em>Examiner</em> 18 Jan. 1824: 40-41. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Paley, Morton D. <em>Portraits of Coleridge</em>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> <em>The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany</em> Vol. 3. (August, 1825 – October, 1826): Edinburgh, 1826. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>“The Phrenological System.” <em>The Bristol Mercury</em> 1697 (September 30, 1822). Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Sekula, Allen. “The Body and the Archive.” <em>October</em> 39 (1986): 3-64. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Spencer, Frank. <em>History of Physical Anthropology</em>. New York: Garland Pub., 1997. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Wrobel, Arthur. "Whitman and the Phrenologists: The Divine Body and the Sensuous Soul." <em>PMLA</em> 89.1 (1974): 17-23. Print.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-long-title field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Long Title:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">EXPLANATION OF THE CUTS. (abbreviated c.)…4, frontal views of the organs: 5 is a profile cut of Washington: 6, of Franklin: 7, of Herschel: 8,9, of Le Blanc, the murderer of Judge Sayre and family, of N. J.:…16, 17, of an Indian chief: 18, of De Witt Clinton: 19, of Brunell, engineer of the Thames tunnel, Engl.: 20, of Philip, a notorious thief and liar, (p. 320): 21, 27, of a skull found on the British lines at York town, Va,: 22, 23, of a remarkably intelligent monkey: 24, 32,</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-featured-in-exhibit field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Featured in Exhibit:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/exhibit/george-cruikshank-and-phrenological-head">George Cruikshank and the Phrenological Head</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-from-the-collection field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">From the Collection:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/collection/department-special-collections-memorial-library-university-wisconsin-madison">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-people- field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated People:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Orson S. Fowler (1809-1887)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Orson S. Fowler was an American phrenologist who, along with his brother Lorenzo Niles, published <em>The American Phrenological Journal</em>. The Fowlers were instrumental in publicizing George Combe's phrenological principles; they owned a museum and published to an audience of 150 thousand (Colbert 24-6). Fowler was involved in other reform movements and publishing ventures; as a friend of Walt Whitman, he distributed the 1855 edition and published and distributed the 1856 edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> (Wrobel 17).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/phrenology" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">phrenology</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/tags/science" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">science</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-style field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Style:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/style/medicalscientific-textbook-illustration" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Medical/scientific textbook illustration</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-artist-unknown field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Artist Unknown:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Artist Unknown</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-creation-technique- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Creation Technique:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/creation-technique/uncolored-engraving" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Uncolored Engraving</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-creator-author field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Author:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Fowler, Orson Squire</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-support-medium field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Support Medium:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/support-medium/print-bound-in-book" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Print, bound in book</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Romantic Circles Gallery</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-skeleton-data- field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Skeleton Data?:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section>Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:41:04 +000038452 at http://www.rc.umd.eduRelative Size of the Organs and Table of Referenceshttp://www.rc.umd.edu/gallery/relative-size-of-the-organs-and-table-of-references
<section class="field field-name-field-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">This chart provides the "average," "full," "large," "very large," "moderate," "small," and "very small" sizes of the organs measured in each phrenological category.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-copyright field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Copyright:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Copyright 2009, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-galleryimage field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Gallery Image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/galleryOriginals/66413704b3fda68a9c7c5c810ccf2eb3.jpg" width="4515" height="3730" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-text-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1847</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-image-date field-type-partial-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1847</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-publication-date field-type-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Original publication date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1846-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1846</span></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-subject field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Subject:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Charts such as this, included in <em>Fowler’s Practical Phrenology</em> (1847), provided a set of easily understood, “objective” measurements which all people—regardless of their medical training—could use to evaluate others. Such charts and the guides which published them trained the nineteenth-century reader in a gaze which privileged the exterior and the scientific—a gaze Michel Foucault identified as the “clinical gaze” (Foucault 103ff).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-pub-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Added Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">2009-5-20</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/orson-squire-fowler" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Orson Squire Fowler</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-primary-works field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Primary Works:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Fowler's Practical Phrenology</em></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-accession-number- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Accession Number:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">BF 870.F6</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-height-in-centimeters field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Height (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">14</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-width-in-centimeters- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Width (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">18</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-printing-context field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Printing Context:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Created for <em>Fowler's Practical Phrenology</em></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-texts field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Texts:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Fowler's Practical Phrenology (1847)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Fowler’s handbook was described by one reviewer as “the best work now extant on the elementary principles and practical part of the science” (“Article VI” 187). The book, which had sold almost ten thousand copies by 1841, incorporated the work of Franz Joseph Gall, Johann Spurzheim, George Combe, and others into a single comprehensive guide to phrenology (“Article VI” 187). An examination of Fowler’s handbook reveals the extent to which he drew on these preceding thinkers: the names, locations, and descriptions of the organs of interest to phrenology are similar, as is the larger discussion on the uses of phrenology. Fowler also expanded on the work of British phrenologists, discussing physiognomy as well as its sub-science phrenology, providing accounts of the effects of diet and habit on an individual’s character, offering clear directions for the process of phrenological examination, and narrating accounts of successful examinations. The work also included letters objecting to phrenological truths, accompanied by Fowler's own responses in defence of those truths. Furthermore, Fowler expanded the discussion of organs of phrenology; his descriptions span nearly 150 pages. The description of the organ of approbativeness, for example, is given six pages. An individual with a large organ of approbativeness “is extremely sensitive upon every point connected with his honour, his character, his reputation, &c., and, in all he does, will have an eye to the approbation and the disapprobation of his fellow men” (Fowler 108).<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div><em>Outlines of Phrenology (1824)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Although any of the didactic literature on phrenology might be appropriate here, George Combe’s <em>Outlines of Phrenology</em> is especially appropriate. Combe was one of the earliest advocates of phrenology in the UK; he initiated both the Edinburgh Phrenological Society and its journal, the <em>Phrenological Journal and Miscellany</em>. Combe published several phrenological tracts on the philosophical and scientific backgrounds of phrenology and its use in education, criminal investigation and correction, and theology (Spencer 292). Combe’s books were sold widely in the United States; he also lectured in the United States from 1838 to 1840 (“Advertisement” 76; “Article VI” 187). <div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div><em>Outlines of Phrenology</em> was first published in 1824 and was reprinted in additional editions throughout the nineteenth century (Spencer 292). The pamphlet provided a short explanation of the history of phrenology and its main claims before turning to the methodology of phrenological examination. The majority of the text is concerned with descriptions and illustrations of each organ of interest to phrenologists. The discussion of organ 21, imitation, is typical. After providing the location of the organ (“on the two sides of benevolence”), Combe gives a short discussion of the faculty the organ controls: “The faculty gives the talent for Imitation in general. It contributes to render a poet or author dramatic . . . It aids the portrait-painter, sculptor, and engraver; and it gives the tendency, in speech and conversation, to suit the action to the words” (17). He further provides illustrations of head shapes with large or small organs of imitation (Combe 17).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-theme field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Theme:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Phrenology. Science. Character.</p>
</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-significance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Significance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Phrenological charts published by Fowler and Wells and others allowed untrained Americans to conduct their own phrenological readings. Similar charts were available for a British audience throughout the 1800s. Fowler’s work and other pieces like it reflect phrenology’s international use. Though arriving a bit later in the United States than in Britain, phrenology was hugely popular in both countries. Almost fifty phrenological organizations had formed in the United States by 1841 (“Article VI" 188). Members of such organizations were hopeful that their “science” would prove successful, even in the face of criticism by some members of the religious and medical communities. One journalist wrote:<blockquote>It is impossible to estimate the number of believers in phrenology in this country. The science is now embraced by large numbers in the medical profession, especially among the younger portion. It is also favourably received by many members of the legal and clerical professions, and is beginning to be introduced and respectfully treated in our literary, scientific, and medical institutions. The day of its final triumph and general adoption cannot be far distant. ("Article VI" 189)</blockquote></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-bibliography field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Bibliography:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">"Advertisement 2 -- no Title." Christian Register and Boston Observer (1835-1843) May 13 1843: 76.<em> ProQuest</em>. Web. 1 May. 2009.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>“Article VI.” <em>American Phrenological Journal</em>. (1841): 185-9. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Colbert, Charles. <em>A Measure of Perfection</em>. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Combe, George. <em>Outlines of Phrenology</em>. 5th ed. London: Longman & Co., 1835. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Dames, Nicholas. "The Clinical Novel: Phrenology and 'Villette.'" <em>NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction</em> 29.3 (1996): 367-390. Print. <div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Foucault, Michel. <em>The Birth of the Clinic</em>. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Fowler, Orson Squire. <em>Fowler’s Practical Phrenology: Giving a Concise Elementary View of Phrenology</em>. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1847. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Spencer, Frank. <em>History of Physical Anthropology</em>. New York: Garland Pub., 1997. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Wrobel, Arthur. "Whitman and the Phrenologists: The Divine Body and the Sensuous Soul." <em>PMLA</em> 89.1 (1974): 17-23. Print.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-long-title field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Long Title:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The <em>written</em> figures indicate the <em>relative</em> size of the organs in your head. The LARGER <em>printed</em> figures refer to the <em>pages</em> of "Phrenology Proved, Illustrated, and Applied," where your description of character will be found; and the SMALLER figures, to accompanying <em>cuts</em>. EXPLANATION. THE PROPORTIONATE SIZE of the phrenological organs of the individual examined, and, consequently, the <em>relative</em> power and energy of his primary mental powers; that is, <em>his moral and intellectual character and manifestations</em>, will be indicated by the <em>written</em> figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7: figure 1 signifying VERY SMALL; 2, SMALL; 3, MODERATE; 4, AVERAGE; 5, FULL; 6, LARGE; 7, VERY LARGE. In order to make the indications still plainer, these figures will be written <em>opposite</em> to those lines which describe the individual examined; and at the <em>end</em> of these lines, figures are placed which refer to those pages of "Phrenology Proved, Illustrated, and Ap</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-featured-in-exhibit field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Featured in Exhibit:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/exhibit/george-cruikshank-and-phrenological-head">George Cruikshank and the Phrenological Head</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-from-the-collection field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">From the Collection:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/collection/department-special-collections-memorial-library-university-wisconsin-madison">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-people- field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated People:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Orson S. Fowler (1809-1887)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Orson S. Fowler was an American phrenologist who, along with his brother Lorenzo Niles, published <em>The American Phrenological Journal</em>. The Fowlers were instrumental in publicizing George Combe's phrenological principles; they owned a museum and published to an audience of 150 thousand (Colbert 24-6). Fowler was involved in other reform movements and publishing ventures; as a friend of Walt Whitman, he distributed the 1855 edition and published and distributed the 1856 edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> (Wrobel 17).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/phrenology" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">phrenology</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/tags/science" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">science</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/character" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">character</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-style field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Style:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/style/medicalscientific-textbook-illustration" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Medical/scientific textbook illustration</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/style/text" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Text</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-artist-unknown field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Artist Unknown:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Artist Unknown</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-creation-technique- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Creation Technique:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/creation-technique/engraving" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Engraving</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-creator-author field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Author:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Fowler, Orson Squire</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-support-medium field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Support Medium:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/support-medium/paper" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paper</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Romantic Circles Gallery</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-skeleton-data- field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Skeleton Data?:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section>Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:41:04 +000038454 at http://www.rc.umd.eduThe Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described, Plate 16http://www.rc.umd.edu/gallery/the-organs-of-the-senses-familiarly-described-plate-16
<section class="field field-name-field-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">This image, Plate 16 of Bell's illustrations, depicts the inner ear. Bell describes it as such: "These are the mastoid cells. They are thought to strengthen the effect of the sound, by reverberating the air from the tympanum."<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Another helpful text, from <em>Chambers's Edinburgh Journal</em>, is given below, demonstrating what was known about the ear at the time:
<blockquote>The sonorous vibrations collected by the winding channels of the external ear, and transmitted along the auditory passage, strike the tympanum or drum, which divides the outer from the inner ear. It stretches obliquely from above downwards across the bottom of the passage and, in a natural state, is impervious to air . . . the purpose of the drum is to receive the sonorous vibrations from without, and to repeat them, so that the inner parts may take them up, and render them cognisable to the mind. ("The Ear" 411)</blockquote></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-copyright field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Copyright:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-galleryimage field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Gallery Image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/galleryOriginals/eb416872b84202522cd63df5d74bec30.jpg" width="2093" height="2879" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-text-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">183</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-image-date field-type-partial-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1830</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-publication-date field-type-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Original publication date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-start" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1829-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1829</span> to <span class="date-display-end" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1838-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1838</span></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-subject field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Subject:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The series of plates given in this gallery depicts the ear and how it works. In this image, the second plate of the series, Bell gives us a look at the inner ear.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-pub-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Added Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">2009-05-04</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-primary-works field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Primary Works:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-accession-number- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Accession Number:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">RE26 O6 B45 074</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-provenance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Provenance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Charles Bell’s work, <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>, contains twenty colored plates. In addition, Bell includes eighty-five pages of descriptive text. The text was made available by Harvey and Co., Gracechurch Street, sometime in the 1830s.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-exhibition-history field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Exhibition History:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>No exhibition history identified.</p>
</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-height-in-centimeters field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Height (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">17</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-width-in-centimeters- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Width (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">10</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parts-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parts Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Plate 16 of the original twenty in Bell's <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-printing-context field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Printing Context:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">These plates, each of which depicts a different part of the ear, appear as illustrations in Bell’s text. We can assume the plates are like those encountered by surgical students in Bell's lectures on the structure and function of the ear.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-events field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Events:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">In 1828, Bell accepted the Professorship of Physiology and Surgery at the newly opened University of London (Gordon-Taylor). Even after the college incorporated the Middlesex Hospital School and Bell was able to practice surgery there in 1835, his alma mater, Edinburgh, wooed him back to be Chair of Surgery. The estimated publication date of this text makes it likely that the text was written during his time at one of these two schools, which may indicate that the text was either a reference book for beginning medical students in anatomy or an informal way of introducing anatomy to the public. Bell was interested in producing texts that were useful to both scientists and artists. One of his better known texts, <em>Anatomy of Expression</em>, was “justly a favorite of students of anatomy and students of drawing”: in this text, Bell analyzed drawings by Hogarth and others through “the aid of anatomical science, and [demonstrated] how precisely true to nature are the highest delineations of genius” (F.A. 92). It is likely that his own experience and facility with drawing influenced this desire to combine science with art. As an additional influence, however, there was at the time an ongoing discussion concerned with the possible ways in which anatomy influenced human expressions. This conversation, connected to the Romantic fascination with physiognomy, contributed to painters’ and artists’ ability to convey emotion through anatomical verisimillitude and a burgeoning understanding of the function of the muscles and nerves in the face itself (Delaporte).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-places field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Places:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">University of London. Middlesex Hospital School. Edinburgh.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-texts field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Texts:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Charles Bell's <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em> (1803)</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-theme field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Theme:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The senses. Organs of sense. Processing the world around us. Man and the body.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-significance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Significance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell’s understanding of the ear and the specificity and function of the bundling of different types of nerves (such as auditory nerves) significantly increased scientists’ ability to study acoustics and sound theory in the early nineteenth century. As he noted to his brother, “I consider the organs of the outward senses as forming a distinct class of nerves from the other. I trace them to corresponding parts of the brain totally distinct from the origins of the other” (F. A. 95).<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>By providing a more explicit account of how nerves connected to the senses—such as the aural—worked, he reduced some of the mystery surrounding the hearing process. Bell’s illustrations dovetail with his text in a way that aligns the visual and the aural: what he describes, we see, even though he is attempting to explain the ineffable process of making sense of sound. Though Romantic culture seemed to give primacy to the sense of sight, this did not necessarily result in the primacy of what was visible; the fascination with the visible carried with it a silent twin, the lure of the invisible. Acts such as looking at ruins or allegorical portraits required moments of memory and reflection—a tracing of what was visible in an invisible realm. Sophie Thomas notes:
<blockquote>. . . an important part of this history . . . is related to how visual and literary culture in the period engages with what is inherently imaginative, and with what borders on the invisible. And more pointedly, with how the epistemology of the <em>invisible</em> functions as a secret counterpart to the visible, structuring it, conditioning it, even doubling it. (7)</blockquote>
Part of the allure of Romantic spectacles such as the phantasmagoria was created by the trappings of illusion and the accompanying uncertainty about what was seen and <em>how</em> it was being seen. Bell participates in this work—which both elevates and unsettles the trustworthiness of the eye—by seeking to lay bare the underlying mechanisms that make hearing possible: to bring the invisible interior to light, and to make it visible, even though sound itself was ephemeral and fleeting. Work like Bell’s strengthened parallels that were frequently drawn between the functions of eye and ear, such as the comparison between spectacles and ear trumpets. In addition, since scientists and philosophers in the Romantic period were just as invested in the way the observer experienced phenomena as they were in the causes and effects of the phenomena themselves, Bell’s text provides an accurate and concise sketch of how the aural senses of the observing body were perceived.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-function field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Function:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Illustrative</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-bibliography field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Bibliography:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell, Charles. <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>. London: Harvey and Co., 1803. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> DeLaporte, Francis. <em>Anatomy of the Passions</em>. Stanford UP, 2008. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> F. A., "Sir Charles Bell." <em>Fraser's Magazine</em> Jan. 1875: 88-100. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Gordon-Taylor, Gordon. <em>Sir Charles Bell: His Life and Times</em>. Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone Ltd., 1958. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Sterne, Jonathan. <em>The Audible Past</em>. Durham: Duke UP. 2003. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> "The Ear." <em>Chambers's Edinburgh Journal</em> Jan. 1837: 410-411. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Thomas, Sophie. <em>Romanticism and Visuality</em>. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-long-title field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Long Title:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Plate 16: Remove the bone that obstructs our purpose. A colored plate. Aquatint. (tympanum—for it is by this membrane that the vibrations of the atmosphere, causing sound, are communicated to the diminutive bones, and thence eventually to the brain; mastoid cells strengthen sound) A colored plate.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-featured-in-exhibit field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Featured in Exhibit:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/exhibit/making-sense-of-sound">Making Sense of Sound</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-from-the-collection field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">From the Collection:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/collection/department-special-collections-memorial-library-university-wisconsin-madison">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-people- field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated People:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Charles Bell (1774-1842)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Charles Bell was a respected medical man whose research on the nervous system transformed scientists’ understanding of the way nerves and the senses function. Earlier understandings of the nervous system did not differentiate the form or function of individual nerves, maintaining that they conducted a nervous fluid in both directions along the nerve in order to control muscle movement. “That he was virtually the one to whom it should first occur that definite nerves have a definite course from some part of the brain to a certain portion of the periphery, and further, that different nerves have quite distinct functions” is the reason Bell is still known today (Gordon-Taylor 104). Even more interesting for the purposes of this gallery, Bell was also a talented artist, having been taught by his mother as a child. The plates for Bell’s written work were also drawn by Bell.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-style field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Style:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/style/medicalscientific-textbook-illustration" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Medical/scientific textbook illustration</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-artist-unknown field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Artist Unknown:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-creation-technique- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Creation Technique:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/creation-technique/hand-colored-aquatint" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hand-colored Aquatint</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-creator-illustrator field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Illustrator:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell, Charles</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-support-medium field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Support Medium:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/support-medium/print-bound-in-book" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Print, bound in book</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Romantic Circles Gallery</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-skeleton-data- field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Skeleton Data?:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section>Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:41:04 +000038526 at http://www.rc.umd.eduThe Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described, Plate 17http://www.rc.umd.edu/gallery/the-organs-of-the-senses-familiarly-described-plate-17
<section class="field field-name-field-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">This image, Plate 17 of Bell's illustrations, depicts the three small bones of the ear. Bell describes it as such:
<blockquote>The natural size of these bones is shown in Fig. 1 Plate 17, (the orbicular bone being less than a mustard seed), and a magnified view,with their mode of union, in Figure 2. In the latter figure, a, is the hammer; b, its handle, c, the end attached to the membrane of the tympanum, d, the long process, e, the anvil, f, the orbicular bone, g, the head of the stirrup, and h, its base attached to the membrane of the oval hole.</blockquote>
Another helpful text, from <em>Chambers's Edinburgh Journal</em>, is given below, demonstrating what was known about the ear at the time:
<blockquote>The impressions received from the air by the outer membrane of the cavity, are conveyed by a set of small bones to the inner, or opposite, membrane, which is called the membrane of the fendstra ovalis, or oval window, from its covering a hole in the bone leading into the deeper seated parts of the ear… the chain of bones, which convey vibrations from one side of the cavity to the other, amounts to three in number. These are all small, and the least of them is no larger than a millet-seed. ("The Ear" 411)</blockquote></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-copyright field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Copyright:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-galleryimage field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Gallery Image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/galleryOriginals/d9b8fb00bd870bb00c49ae925b8802ce.jpg" width="2149" height="2992" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-text-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">183</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-image-date field-type-partial-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">This date is an estimate 1830</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-publication-date field-type-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Original publication date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-start" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1829-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1829</span> to <span class="date-display-end" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1838-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1838</span></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-subject field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Subject:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The series of plates given in this gallery depicts the ear and how it works. In this image, the third plate of the series, we are shown the three small bones of the ear.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-pub-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Added Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">2009-05-04</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-accession-number- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Accession Number:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">RE26 O6 B45 074</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-provenance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Provenance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Charles Bell’s work, <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>, contains twenty colored plates. In addition, Bell includes eighty-five pages of descriptive text. The text was made available by Harvey and Co., Gracechurch Street, sometime in the 1830s.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-exhibition-history field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Exhibition History:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>No exhibition history identified.</p>
</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-height-in-centimeters field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Height (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">17</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-width-in-centimeters- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Width (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">10</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parts-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parts Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Plate 17 of the original twenty plates in Bell's <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-printing-context field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Printing Context:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">These plates, each of which depicts a different part of the ear, appear as illustrations in Bell’s text. We can assume the plates are like those encountered by surgical students in Bell's lectures on the structure and function of the ear.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-events field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Events:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">In 1828, Bell accepted the Professorship of Physiology and Surgery at the newly opened University of London (Gordon-Taylor). Even after the college incorporated the Middlesex Hospital School and Bell was able to practice surgery there in 1835, his alma mater, Edinburgh, wooed him back to be Chair of Surgery. The estimated publication date of this text makes it likely that the text was written during his time at one of these two schools, which may indicate that the text was either a reference book for beginning medical students in anatomy or an informal way of introducing anatomy to the public. Bell was interested in producing texts that were useful to both scientists and artists. One of his better known texts, <em>Anatomy of Expression</em>, was “justly a favorite of students of anatomy and students of drawing”: in this text, Bell analyzed drawings by Hogarth and others through “the aid of anatomical science, and [demonstrated] how precisely true to nature are the highest delineations of genius” (F. A. 92). It is likely that his own experience and facility with drawing influenced this desire to combine science with art. As an additional influence, however, there was at the time an ongoing discussion concerned with the possible ways in which anatomy influenced human expressions. This conversation, connected to the Romantic fascination with physiognomy, contributed to painters’ and artists’ ability to convey emotion through anatomical verisimillitude and a burgeoning understanding of the function of the muscles and nerves in the face itself (Delaporte).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-places field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Places:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">University of London. Middlesex Hospital School. Edinburgh.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-texts field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Texts:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em> (1803)</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-theme field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Theme:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The senses. Organs of sense. Processing the world around us. Man and the body.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-significance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Significance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell’s understanding of the ear and the specificity and function of the bundling of different types of nerves (such as auditory nerves) significantly increased scientists’ ability to study acoustics and sound theory in the early nineteenth century. As he noted to his brother, “I consider the organs of the outward senses as forming a distinct class of nerves from the other. I trace them to corresponding parts of the brain totally distinct from the origins of the other” (F. A. 95).<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>By providing a more explicit account of how nerves connected to the senses—such as the aural—worked, he reduced some of the mystery surrounding the hearing process. Bell’s illustrations dovetail with his text in a way that aligns the visual and the aural: what he describes, we see, even though he is attempting to explain the ineffable process of making sense of sound. Though Romantic culture seemed to give primacy to the sense of sight, this did not necessarily result in the primacy of what was visible; the fascination with the visible carried with it a silent twin, the lure of the invisible. Acts such as looking at ruins or allegorical portraits required moments of memory and reflection—a tracing of what was visible in an invisible realm. Sophie Thomas notes:
<blockquote>. . . an important part of this history . . . is related to how visual and literary culture in the period engages with what is inherently imaginative, and with what borders on the invisible. And more pointedly, with how the epistemology of the <em>invisible</em> functions as a secret counterpart to the visible, structuring it, conditioning it, even doubling it. (7)</blockquote>
Part of the allure of Romantic spectacles such as the phantasmagoria was created by the trappings of illusion and the accompanying uncertainty about what was seen and <em>how</em> it was being seen. Bell participates in this work—which both elevates and unsettles the trustworthiness of the eye—by seeking to lay bare the underlying mechanisms that make hearing possible: to bring the invisible interior to light, and to make it visible, even though sound itself was ephemeral and fleeting. Work like Bell’s strengthened parallels that were frequently drawn between the functions of eye and ear, such as the comparison between spectacles and ear trumpets. In addition, since scientists and philosophers in the Romantic period were just as invested in the way the observer experienced phenomena as they were in the causes and effects of the phenomena themselves, Bell’s text provides an accurate and concise sketch of how the aural senses of the observing body were perceived.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-function field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Function:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Illustrative</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-bibliography field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Bibliography:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell, Charles. <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>. London: Harvey and Co., 1803. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> DeLaporte, Francis. <em>Anatomy of the Passions</em>. Stanford UP, 2008. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> F. A., "Sir Charles Bell." <em>Fraser's Magazine</em> Jan. 1875: 88-100. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Gordon-Taylor, Gordon. <em>Sir Charles Bell: His Life and Times</em>. Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone Ltd., 1958. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Sterne, Jonathan. <em>The Audible Past</em>. Durham: Duke UP. 2003. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> "The Ear." <em>Chambers's Edinburgh Journal</em> Jan. 1837: 410-411. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Thomas, Sophie. <em>Romanticism and Visuality</em>. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-long-title field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Long Title:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Plate 17: Natural size of these bones. A colored plate. Aquatint.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-featured-in-exhibit field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Featured in Exhibit:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/exhibit/making-sense-of-sound">Making Sense of Sound</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-from-the-collection field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">From the Collection:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/collection/department-special-collections-memorial-library-university-wisconsin-madison">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-people- field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated People:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Charles Bell (1774-1842)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Charles Bell was a respected medical man whose research on the nervous system transformed scientists’ understanding of the way nerves and the senses function. Earlier understandings of the nervous system did not differentiate the form or function of individual nerves, maintaining that they conducted a nervous fluid in both directions along the nerve in order to control muscle movement. “That he was virtually the one to whom it should first occur that definite nerves have a definite course from some part of the brain to a certain portion of the periphery, and further, that different nerves have quite distinct functions” is the reason Bell is still known today (Gordon-Taylor 104). Even more interesting for the purposes of this gallery, Bell was also a talented artist, having been taught by his mother as a child. The plates for Bell’s written work were also drawn by Bell.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-style field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Style:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/style/medicalscientific-textbook-illustration" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Medical/scientific textbook illustration</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-artist-unknown field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Artist Unknown:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-creation-technique- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Creation Technique:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/creation-technique/hand-colored-aquatint" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hand-colored Aquatint</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-creator-illustrator field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Illustrator:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell, Charles</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-support-medium field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Support Medium:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/support-medium/print-bound-in-book" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Print, bound in book</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Romantic Circles Gallery</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-skeleton-data- field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Skeleton Data?:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section>Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:41:04 +000038527 at http://www.rc.umd.eduThe Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described, Plate 18http://www.rc.umd.edu/gallery/the-organs-of-the-senses-familiarly-described-plate-18
<section class="field field-name-field-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">This image, Plate 18 of Bell's illustrations, depicts the semicircular canals of the ear. Bell further describes the image: "The cochlea is named by its similitude to the shell of a snail. It is the most difficult part of the ear to be described."<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Another helpful text, from <em>Chambers's Edinburgh Journal</em>, is given below, demonstrating what was known about the ear at the time:
<blockquote>The oval window was the part mentioned as closing up the cavity of the drum, on the inner side. Beyond it is situated the labyrinth, the deepest seated portion of the organ of hearing. It consists of three portions—the semicircular conals placed superiorly, the vestibule in the middle, and the cohlea undermost. The semicircular canals are three tubes shaped like three loops of a knot, and rise out of the vestibule, a round chamber, from which the cochlea hangs down, resembling, as its name partly implies, the shell of a snail. The canals, vestibule, and cochlea, are all formed of bone, and are called the bony labyrinth . . . though the use of every minute portion of this complicated structure is by no means clear, the impressions of sound, according to our best knowledge of the subject, permeate the ear in the following manner:--the sonorous vibrations of the air, being collected by the external ear, are directed down the auditory passage, and, striking against the membrane of the ear-drum, throw it into vibrations of the same frequency. Corresponding vibrations, again, are excited in the air contained in the cavity of the drum, which communicates with them in its turn to the membrane of the foramen rotundum, or round hold, which, it will be recollected, divides the cavity of the drum from the cochlea. By this means, the fine nervous expansion lining the cochlea, and the fluid in it, are affected by the sonorous vibrations. ("The Ear" 411)</blockquote></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-copyright field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Copyright:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-galleryimage field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Gallery Image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/galleryOriginals/ecf02772b065fa4e003d1da2fa5669d0.jpg" width="2105" height="2890" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-text-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">183</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-image-date field-type-partial-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1830</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-publication-date field-type-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Original publication date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-start" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1829-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1829</span> to <span class="date-display-end" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1838-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1838</span></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-subject field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Subject:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The series of plates given in this gallery depicts the ear and how it works. In this image, the fourth plate of the series, we see the semicircular canals.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-pub-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Added Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">2009-05-04</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-primary-works field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Primary Works:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-accession-number- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Accession Number:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">RE26 O6 B45 074</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-provenance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Provenance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Charles Bell’s work, <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>, contains twenty colored plates. In addition, Bell includes eighty-five pages of descriptive text. The text was made available by Harvey and Co., Gracechurch Street, sometime in the 1830s.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-exhibition-history field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Exhibition History:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">No exhibition history identified.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-height-in-centimeters field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Height (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">17</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-width-in-centimeters- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Width (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">10</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parts-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parts Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Plate 18 of the original twenty in Bell’s <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-printing-context field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Printing Context:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">These plates, each of which depicts a different part of the ear, appear as illustrations in Bell’s text. We can assume the plates are like those encountered by surgical students in Bell's lectures on the structure and function of the ear.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-events field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Events:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">In 1828, Bell accepted the Professorship of Physiology and Surgery at the newly opened University of London (Gordon-Taylor). Even after the college incorporated the Middlesex Hospital School and Bell was able to practice surgery there in 1835, his alma mater, Edinburgh, wooed him back to be Chair of Surgery. The estimated publication date of this text makes it likely that the text was written during his time at one of these two schools, which may indicate that the text was either a reference book for beginning medical students in anatomy or an informal way of introducing anatomy to the public. Bell was interested in producing texts that were useful to both scientists and artists. One of his better known texts, <em>Anatomy of Expression</em>, was “justly a favorite of students of anatomy and students of drawing”: in this text, Bell analyzed drawings by Hogarth and others through “the aid of anatomical science, and [demonstrated] how precisely true to nature are the highest delineations of genius” (F. A. 92). It is likely that his own experience and facility with drawing influenced this desire to combine science with art. As an additional influence, however, there was at the time an ongoing discussion concerned with the possible ways in which anatomy influenced human expressions. This conversation, connected to the Romantic fascination with physiognomy, contributed to painters’ and artists’ ability to convey emotion through anatomical verisimillitude and a burgeoning understanding of the function of the muscles and nerves in the face itself (Delaporte).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-places field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Places:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">University of London. Middlesex Hospital School. Edinburgh.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-texts field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Texts:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Charles Bell's <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-theme field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Theme:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The senses. Organs of sense. Processing the world around us. Man and the body.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-significance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Significance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell’s understanding of the ear and the specificity and function of the bundling of different types of nerves (such as auditory nerves) significantly increased scientists’ ability to study acoustics and sound theory in the early nineteenth century. As he noted to his brother, “I consider the organs of the outward senses as forming a distinct class of nerves from the other. I trace them to corresponding parts of the brain totally distinct from the origins of the other” (F. A. 95).<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>By providing a more explicit account of how nerves connected to the senses—such as the aural—worked, he reduced some of the mystery surrounding the hearing process. Bell’s illustrations dovetail with his text in a way that aligns the visual and the aural: what he describes, we see, even though he is attempting to explain the ineffable process of making sense of sound. Though Romantic culture seemed to give primacy to the sense of sight, this did not necessarily result in the primacy of what was visible; the fascination with the visible carried with it a silent twin, the lure of the invisible. Acts such as looking at ruins or allegorical portraits required moments of memory and reflection—a tracing of what was visible in an invisible realm. Sophie Thomas notes:
<blockquote>. . . an important part of this history . . . is related to how visual and literary culture in the period engages with what is inherently imaginative, and with what borders on the invisible. And more pointedly, with how the epistemology of the <em>invisible</em> functions as a secret counterpart to the visible, structuring it, conditioning it, even doubling it. (7)</blockquote>
Part of the allure of Romantic spectacles such as the phantasmagoria was created by the trappings of illusion and the accompanying uncertainty about what was seen and <em>how</em> it was being seen. Bell participates in this work—which both elevates and unsettles the trustworthiness of the eye—by seeking to lay bare the underlying mechanisms that make hearing possible: to bring the invisible interior to light, and to make it visible, even though sound itself was ephemeral and fleeting. Work like Bell’s strengthened parallels that were frequently drawn between the functions of eye and ear, such as the comparison between spectacles and ear trumpets. In addition, since scientists and philosophers in the Romantic period were just as invested in the way the observer experienced phenomena as they were in the causes and effects of the phenomena themselves, Bell’s text provides an accurate and concise sketch of how the aural senses of the observing body were perceived.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-function field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Function:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Illustrative</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-bibliography field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Bibliography:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell, Charles. <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>. London: Harvey and Co., 1803. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> DeLaporte, Francis. <em>Anatomy of the Passions</em>. Stanford UP, 2008. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> F. A., "Sir Charles Bell." <em>Fraser's Magazine</em> Jan. 1875: 88-100. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Gordon-Taylor, Gordon. <em>Sir Charles Bell: His Life and Times</em>. Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone Ltd., 1958. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Sterne, Jonathan. <em>The Audible Past</em>. Durham: Duke UP. 2003. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> "The Ear." <em>Chambers's Edinburgh Journal</em> Jan. 1837: 410-411. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Thomas, Sophie. <em>Romanticism and Visuality</em>. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-long-title field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Long Title:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Plate 18: Openings into the semicircular canals (labyrinth). A colored plate. Aquatint.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-featured-in-exhibit field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Featured in Exhibit:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/exhibit/making-sense-of-sound">Making Sense of Sound</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-from-the-collection field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">From the Collection:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/collection/department-special-collections-memorial-library-university-wisconsin-madison">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-people- field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated People:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Charles Bell (1774-1842)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Charles Bell was a respected medical man whose research on the nervous system transformed scientists’ understanding of the way nerves and the senses function. Earlier understandings of the nervous system did not differentiate the form or function of individual nerves, maintaining that they conducted a nervous fluid in both directions along the nerve in order to control muscle movement. “That he was virtually the one to whom it should first occur that definite nerves have a definite course from some part of the brain to a certain portion of the periphery, and further, that different nerves have quite distinct functions” is the reason Bell is still known today (Gordon-Taylor 104). Even more interesting for the purposes of this gallery, Bell was also a talented artist, having been taught by his mother as a child. The plates for Bell’s written work were also drawn by Bell.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-style field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Style:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/style/medicalscientific-textbook-illustration" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Medical/scientific textbook illustration</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-artist-unknown field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Artist Unknown:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-creation-technique- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Creation Technique:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/creation-technique/hand-colored-aquatint" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hand-colored Aquatint</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-creator-illustrator field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Illustrator:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell, Charles</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-support-medium field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Support Medium:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/support-medium/print-bound-in-book" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Print, bound in book</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Romantic Circles Gallery</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-skeleton-data- field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Skeleton Data?:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section>Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:41:04 +000038552 at http://www.rc.umd.eduThe Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described, Plate 13http://www.rc.umd.edu/gallery/the-organs-of-the-senses-familiarly-described-plate-13
<section class="field field-name-field-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">This image, Plate 13 of Bell's illustrations, depicts the ear without the skin. The numbers and their labels are given below:<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>A: the helix<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>B: the unnamed cavity<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>C: the antihelix<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>D: its cavity, called the scapha<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>E: the tragus<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>F: the antitragus<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>G: the concha, or great cavity<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Bell further describes the image in the accompanying text:
<blockquote>At the part H is the tube called the external auditory passage, which is cartilaginous at its outer portion, but its inner end is formed by a channel to the temporal bone. From the skin lining this passage, many small hairs stand across: and underneath it, is a set of small glands, which secrete the wax of the ear, and send it through their little ducts into the passage. This wax, which is viscous and bitter, guards the internal parts from insects.</blockquote>
Another helpful text, from <em>Chambers's Edinburgh Journal</em>, is given below, demonstrating what was known about the ear at the time:
<blockquote>The external ear is the natural ear trumpet. It is spread out for the collection of sound, and is formed of a substance named cartilage, which holds an intermediate existence between bone and flesh. In this we observe a purpose: from bone, vibrations of sound would be reverberated, and by flesh they would be absorbed, while such a substance as cartilage is calculated to avoid either reverberation or absorption. It is covered with a very thin skin, and has several channels or depressions, which all lead into one cavity, in which the passage to the drum commences. These channels need not be particularly described, their general purpose of collecting sound being all that is worthy of note. ("The Ear" 410)</blockquote></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-copyright field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Copyright:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-galleryimage field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Gallery Image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/galleryOriginals/5d1f9ec4b90efcbd415b2fe8cecb05e9.jpg" width="2070" height="2930" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-text-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">183</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-image-date field-type-partial-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">1830</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-publication-date field-type-date field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Original publication date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-start" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1829-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1829</span> to <span class="date-display-end" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="1838-12-31T23:59:58-04:56">1838</span></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-subject field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Subject:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The series of plates given in this gallery depicts the ear and how it works. In this image, the first plate of the series, we see the ear without skin.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-original-pub-date field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Image Added Date:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">2009-05-04</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-primary-works field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Primary Works:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-accession-number- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Accession Number:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">RE26 O6 B45 074</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-provenance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Provenance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Charles Bell’s work, <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>, contains twenty colored plates. In addition, Bell includes eighty-five pages of descriptive text. The text was made available by Harvey and Co., Gracechurch Street, sometime in the 1830s.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-exhibition-history field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Exhibition History:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">No exhibition history identified.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-height-in-centimeters field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Height (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">17</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-width-in-centimeters- field-type-text field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Width (in centimeters):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">10</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parts-description field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parts Description:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Plate 13 of the original twenty in Bell’s <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-printing-context field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Printing Context:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">These plates, each of which depicts a different part of the ear, appear as illustrations in Bell’s text. We can assume the plates are like those encountered by surgical students in Bell's lectures on the structure and function of the ear.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-events field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Events:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">In 1828, Bell accepted the Professorship of Physiology and Surgery at the newly opened University of London (Gordon-Taylor). Even after the college incorporated the Middlesex Hospital School and Bell was able to practice surgery there in 1835, his alma mater, Edinburgh, wooed him back to be Chair of Surgery. The estimated publication date of this text makes it likely that the text was written during his time at one of these two schools, which may indicate that the text was either a reference book for beginning medical students in anatomy or an informal way of introducing anatomy to the public. Bell was interested in producing texts that were useful to both scientists and artists. One of his better known texts, <em>Anatomy of Expression</em>, was “justly a favorite of students of anatomy and students of drawing”: in this text, Bell analyzed drawings by Hogarth and others through “the aid of anatomical science, and [demonstrated] how precisely true to nature are the highest delineations of genius” (F. A. 92). It is likely that his own experience and facility with drawing influenced this desire to combine science with art. As an additional influence, however, there was at the time an ongoing discussion concerned with the possible ways in which anatomy influenced human expressions. This conversation, connected to the Romantic fascination with physiognomy, contributed to painters’ and artists’ ability to convey emotion through anatomical verisimillitude and a burgeoning understanding of the function of the muscles and nerves in the face itself (Delaporte).</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-places field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Places:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">University of London. Middlesex Hospital School. Edinburgh.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-texts field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated Texts:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Charles Bell's <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em> (1803)</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-theme field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Theme:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The senses. Organs of sense. Processing the world around us. Man and the body.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-significance field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Significance:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell’s understanding of the ear and the specificity and function of the bundling of different types of nerves (such as auditory nerves) significantly increased scientists’ ability to study acoustics and sound theory in the early nineteenth century. As he noted to his brother, “I consider the organs of the outward senses as forming a distinct class of nerves from the other. I trace them to corresponding parts of the brain totally distinct from the origins of the other” (F. A. 95).<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>By providing a more explicit account of how nerves connected to the senses—such as the aural—worked, he reduced some of the mystery surrounding the hearing process. Bell’s illustrations dovetail with his text in a way that aligns the visual and the aural: what he describes, we see, even though he is attempting to explain the ineffable process of making sense of sound. Though Romantic culture seemed to give primacy to the sense of sight, this did not necessarily result in the primacy of what was visible; the fascination with the visible carried with it a silent twin, the lure of the invisible. Acts such as looking at ruins or allegorical portraits required moments of memory and reflection—a tracing of what was visible in an invisible realm. Sophie Thomas notes:
<blockquote>. . . an important part of this history . . . is related to how visual and literary culture in the period engages with what is inherently imaginative, and with what borders on the invisible. And more pointedly, with how the epistemology of the <em>invisible</em> functions as a secret counterpart to the visible, structuring it, conditioning it, even doubling it. (7)</blockquote>
Part of the allure of Romantic spectacles such as the phantasmagoria was created by the trappings of illusion and the accompanying uncertainty about what was seen and <em>how</em> it was being seen. Bell participates in this work—which both elevates and unsettles the trustworthiness of the eye—by seeking to lay bare the underlying mechanisms that make hearing possible: to bring the invisible interior to light, and to make it visible, even though sound itself was ephemeral and fleeting. Work like Bell’s strengthened parallels that were frequently drawn between the functions of eye and ear, such as the comparison between spectacles and ear trumpets. In addition, since scientists and philosophers in the Romantic period were just as invested in the way the observer experienced phenomena as they were in the causes and effects of the phenomena themselves, Bell’s text provides an accurate and concise sketch of how the aural senses of the observing body were perceived.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Bell’s "Initial Introduction" is given below:
<blockquote>As rays of light dart forth in all directions from a luminous body, so rays of sound, as they may be termed, issue in every direction from a sonorous body… Sounds obey the laws of reflexion, and although no part of the ear is adapted absolutely to bring them into focus, still its external cartilages are understood by their form and slight motion, to have the power of collection the vibrations and reflecting them onwards to the tympanum. Neither the outward ear, nor the tympanous membrane are essential to sound. Air is essential to sound, though not to light: sound is in fact the vibration of the air communicated to the brain.</blockquote>
This introduction sets up the confluence between the ways of understanding sight and sound that were common at the time Bell was writing; like objects observed by the eye, which were not accurately represented through photography until later in the nineteenth century, sound was similarly impossible to accurately preserve. As Jonathan Sterne notes in <em>The Audible Past</em>, “before the invention of sound-reproduction technologies, we are told, sound withered away. It existed only as it went out of existence” (Sterne 1). Sound had to be described in visual terms because there was no capacity to replay or recreate sounds; what was spoken, sung, or played was truly lost forever, which only began to change with the introduction of new devices like the telephone and the phonograph. This gallery looks at sound during a time when it was not as commodified or industrialized as it was later in the nineteenth century. However, the way that Romantic individuals had to visualize sound shaped the way that recording technology developed, as the Romantic imagination envisioned the possibility of sound made concrete and accessible for repeated listening. These kinds of mindsets paved the way for machines like the ear phonautograph, an early ancestor of the telephone and the phonograph, which was “an excised human ear attached by thumbscrews to a wooden chassis . . . [that] produced tracings of sound on a sheet of smoked glass when sound entered the mouthpiece” (Sterne 31). The way that the ear itself was understood, as well as the visual register in which sound had first been “recorded,” made the ear phonautograph an understandable, if grisly, foray into sound reproduction.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-function field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Function:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Illustrative</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-bibliography field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Bibliography:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell, Charles. <em>The Organs of the Senses Familiarly Described</em>. London: Harvey and Co., 1803. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> DeLaporte, Francis. <em>Anatomy of the Passions</em>. Stanford UP, 2008. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> F. A., "Sir Charles Bell." <em>Fraser's Magazine</em> Jan. 1875: 88-100. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Gordon-Taylor, Gordon. <em>Sir Charles Bell: His Life and Times</em>. Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone Ltd., 1958. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Sterne, Jonathan. <em>The Audible Past</em>. Durham: Duke UP. 2003. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> "The Ear." <em>Chambers's Edinburgh Journal</em> Jan. 1837: 410-411. Print.<div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div> Thomas, Sophie. <em>Romanticism and Visuality</em>. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-long-title field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Long Title:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Plate 13: The ear divested of its skin.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-featured-in-exhibit field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Featured in Exhibit:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/exhibit/making-sense-of-sound">Making Sense of Sound</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-from-the-collection field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">From the Collection:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/gallery/collection/department-special-collections-memorial-library-university-wisconsin-madison">Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-associated-people- field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Associated People:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><em>Charles Bell (1774-1842)</em><div class="customBreak"><br /><br /></div>Charles Bell was a respected medical man whose research on the nervous system transformed scientists’ understanding of the way nerves and the senses function. Earlier understandings of the nervous system did not differentiate the form or function of individual nerves, maintaining that they conducted a nervous fluid in both directions along the nerve in order to control muscle movement. “That he was virtually the one to whom it should first occur that definite nerves have a definite course from some part of the brain to a certain portion of the periphery, and further, that different nerves have quite distinct functions” is the reason Bell is still known today (Gordon-Taylor 104). Even more interesting for the purposes of this gallery, Bell was also a talented artist, having been taught by his mother as a child. The plates for Bell’s written work were also drawn by Bell.</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-style field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Style:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/style/medicalscientific-textbook-illustration" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Medical/scientific textbook illustration</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-artist-unknown field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Artist Unknown:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-creation-technique- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Creation Technique:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/creation-technique/hand-colored-aquatint" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hand-colored Aquatint</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-creator-illustrator field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Illustrator:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Bell, Charles</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-support-medium field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Support Medium:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/support-medium/print-bound-in-book" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Print, bound in book</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Romantic Circles Gallery</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-skeleton-data- field-type-list-boolean field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Skeleton Data?:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></section>Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:41:04 +000038553 at http://www.rc.umd.edu